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Workbench Concept Art

Over the weekend, I was having serious trouble modeling out what I thought the assembly area on the desk would look like.

Originally I had envisioned an aligator clip contraption, sets of tweezers, and a magnifier lamp. That all seemed kind of boring though. I then came up with a stepper motor kind of arm contraption that would be used in place of the aligator clips. As it turns out, this is a hard thing to model without some kind of visual reference… and since it’s a fictional piece of equipment… well… I had to go back to the drawing board… literally.

The actual size of this armature would be pretty small as what it held would be the primary focal point of the magnifier lamp. Since it’d be pretty small, it’s impractical to adjust the thing by hand, so I came up with a set of dials which will connect via wires to the robotic armature.

Here you see three knobs, which ostensibly control three axis of adjustment that the arm can move in. The larger, shorter section of the knob is used for “course” movement and the smaller, longer inner knob is for “fine” movement.

My first stab at drawing this thing had all 3 knobs lined up in space, but it occurred to me that if I did that, the gearing of the knobs within the housing would all intersect. Because of that, they’re all offset from each other slightly in the drawing… and will also be in the model.